A former senior minister in British Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet is quoted today saying the British government tried to rein in US policy in Iraq from the outset of the March 2003 invasion.
David Blunkett, Home Secretary at the time of the invasion, told newspapers that vice president Dick Cheney and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld could not be diverted from their goal of dismantling the Iraqi Ba'athist government.
"The issue was: 'What the hell do you do about it?' All we could do as a nation of 60 million off the coast of mainland Europe was to seek to influence the most powerful nation in the world," he said in interviews to publicise his new diaries.
"We did seek to influence them, but we were not in charge, so you cannot say that if only the government recognised what needed to be done, it would all have been different. The government did recognise the problem," he added.
"We dismantled the structure of a functioning state," he said, adding that the British view was: "Change them by all means, decapitate them even, but very quickly get the arms and legs moving."
Mr Blunkett's revelations come as the violence in Iraq reaches new heights, with an average of 100 people a day being killed.
He was forced to resign in 2004 and then again after being reinstated following elections the following year amid scandals about his private and public life.
He admits in the interviews ahead of the newspaper serialisation starting next week of his diaries "My Life in the Bearpit" that at the height of the first scandals over his affair with a married woman that he nearly had a breakdown.
Meanwhile, Mr Blair and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met over breakfast today to discuss the Middle East after her tour of the region this week.
Mr Blair's spokeswoman said the breakfast was private and not intended as a follow-up to last night's ministerial meeting of six world powers that agreed to discuss further steps to pressure Iran into halting its nuclear programme.
"The Prime Minister did say when he made his visit to the Middle East that he would be going back, so it is right that he talks to Condoleezza when she has just got back from the region herself," the spokeswoman said after the Chequers meeting.
Ms Rice visited Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Iraq on her tour.
Mr Blair has offered staunch support to the American strategy in Iraq which is threatened by sectarian conflict and insurgency three years after the fall of Saddam Hussein.